Playing Red
by Rabbitprint
Summary: DW8 XL, spoilers for Shu hypothetical route, set during Chibi to Fan Castle. Xu Shu character study, giftfic for Bellflower. Liu Bei has taken him back, but there are times when Xu Shu feels that he is still on the boats at Chibi, burning down with them.


The first thing he was taught when learning _xiangqi_ is that you do not play the field: you play your opponent, and they are a field all their own, different each time, the terrain laid out in separate strokes of their face, their hands, their heart.

(He has always been poor at _xiangqi_; others, he knows, would have excelled even as children, claiming kingdoms of their own while he wallowed in the erosion of his pieces.)

The next thing he was taught was that having the opening move affords a win more often than a loss - but only so long as you can maintain your aggression. Boldness is vital for all things: war, business, love. It is different from brashness, which is a deception that works only upon the user. To win is to claim dominance over every part of your opponent. You must have the confidence to intimidate, the surety of action which will disguise any mistakes as cunning. The opening move must bluff by its very nature. It is forced to declare itself before it knows the shape of its enemy, and so forces others to react in turn.

His first tutor taught him that Red begins each match. His second, who was from a different village, insisted on Black. Both agreed that the order is key. It does not matter which colors you wear. Victory only comes to those who can carry them through.

Xu Shu learned enough to best his second tutor, but he never conquered his first, and so he plays all his games from now on with Red as the opener, forever pitting himself against an enemy he will never again have the chance to beat.

Confidence is the key. Confidence leads the charge. Red has betrayed its position first. In exposing itself, it must capitalize upon its rapacity. Red in the wrong hands is an equation for disaster; even if it knows nothing of what is behind it, it must still gallop ahead and secure a new footing, convincing its soldiers to follow into the implacable wall of the enemy. Black can still win if it is patient, if it can turn the momentum towards its own advantage and force Red to fall back, stumbling into lines they have not fully prepared, fortifications which they abandoned half-formed behind them.

Red favors those who know themselves best. Black favors those who know their enemy.

Xu Shu thinks sometimes about which of the armies would fit each color, measuring opening gambits and counter-responses. Red would be Cao Cao's side, even as his flag runs blue, the ripples of Wei unabashed by the blood that stains it. Red befits a conqueror. It advances, relentless, shrieking across the battlefield like a hundred hungry ghosts.

Black is the side for those who may still be hoping for peace rather than battle; it has the luxury of reaction even as it is one foot back, its infantry forced to flinch in their rows as they watch the horses bearing down upon them. Even attacked first, it does not make for an easy victim. Black suits Liu Bei. Focused on defense, on the preservation of a dream along with the people. One does not survive without the other.

(Simply put: this means both will die together as well.)

Playing Black is how Xu Shu learned to recoil in preliminary expectation of failure: hearing always the disapproving clicks of his tutors' tongues as they watched him scramble to minimize his losses, unable to allocate deaths properly to his sacrificial wooden soldiers in order to secure the win. Playing Black taught him both safety and shame, everything he both loves and cringes away from now.

But Lui Bei is of stronger stuff than Xu Shu; _all_ of Shu's soldiers are stronger, it seems, able to march and fight and fuck and grin it all away without losing faith in themselves and one another, hauling their ideals alongside their spears, turning fantasies into flags planted on conquered battlefields. Their story is already written. It will be full of glory and dignity and will only grow in years to come, ascending into legends and godhood. Even if they fail, that loss will be equally beautiful - along with being Xu Shu's fault, for being taken back into their camp before he is capable of properly guiding them. If nothing else, he will be guilty of wanting this for himself, rather than insisting on Zhuge Liang as the better option. The only option. The _best._

Zhuge Liang has conquered Cao Cao's ships. Zhuge Liang has conquered Xu Shu.

Liu Bei's heart - Xu Shu thinks, in those moments between skirmishes, when he has heard the word _benevolence_ for so long that he wants to take it apart stroke by stroke - Liu Bei's _heart_ has never recognized its own sharpness. Liu Bei is not a man who knows what it's like to feel the weight of pity burning you. He has always been on the giving side of that exchange. Even when driven back, weeping over the dead, he has never been lowered by his losses. He does not know what it feels like to have pity scald the soul, like heated gold that has gone soft and glittering, but which will char your flesh all the way through to the bone if you dare to touch it.

Liu Bei has taken him back, but there are times when Xu Shu feels that he is still on the boats at Chibi, burning down with them.

* * *

No one brands him as a traitor. That is, perhaps, the worst part. He has no reputation to lose in their eyes. Even if he did, battles between Liu Bei, Cao Cao and Sun Quan have become so fluid in their lines that they are all the same army at times, soldiers changing sides as readily as a heart in spring. Peace drives them to murder their own brethren, in both oath and blood. Friends become enemies with your name fresh upon their lips. Guan Yu still guffaws over jokes he learned from officers in Cao Cao's camp, his virtue so impeccable that he gains admirers even among the soldiers who seek to kill him.

Zhuge Liang offers polite cups of tea, and waits for Xu Shu to talk.

In the days following Cao Cao's retreat from Chibi, Xu Shu watches the withers of his horse steadily plod forward and carry him along with the rest of the army. Despite rejoining their ranks, he cannot see himself as one of them. There is nothing yet to see. Liu Bei has given him a rank, but Xu Shu has achieved nothing significant with it so far. He is little more than a soldier with no rank and no skills to speak of, a piece that has been flipped over so that it shows only blankness as its face.

The reins chafe his fingers. He tightens his grip. He cannot allow himself to squander his second chance.

There is still a war to fight. There are many, many wars.

(Zhuge Liang does not need to play _xiangqi_ anymore, Xu Shu thinks, except to prove the point that it is inessential, like so much else about a world which can be balanced on the single feather of a fan.)

(Zhuge Liang is not a field to be read: he is the rulebook itself, defining Xu Shu's losses before the pieces can even be touched.)

* * *

With the Red Cliffs dwindling behind them, they follow Cao Cao down the Huarong Road. Shu and Wu move together, intermingling easily in their victory. The armies are replete with conquest.

Xu Shu rides with them. Liu Bei has given him a few divisions to shepherd, passing him to Zhang Fei's forces as the third strategist for three sworn brothers. Pang Tong vanishes and reappears at whim as the other man moves back and forth between the ranks, chuckling easily behind his mask. Zhuge Liang is always with Liu Bei. The three of them meet at the intersections of their days to share news, like stars in a constellation: two smaller lights hooked to a brilliance in the center, nearly lost beside it. Navigators look to that greater light first as their guide. The others only exist for confirmation.

The weather does not forget its summons. The winds came for the Dragon's call, and now the storm lingers: in the sky, in the clouds, in Zhuge Liang's smile as he casts his eyes to the heavens and reads the will of the divine. The soldiers are less comfortable. Winter campaigns are rarely loved, and less so by veterans. Near Xu Shu's marching line, he can hear Huang Gai puffing and asking where the furs went. Even his giant's bulk is chilled.

Rain makes the marshlands twice as cruel. Waters bulge over the banks. Paths that were already difficult for calvary to cross now swallow foot soldiers whole. Sometimes the scouts lose half a day trying to find the places where Cao Cao's troops threw down grass to thicken the mud, packing the ground into slippery, melting stews that reek of decay.

There are Wei soldiers left behind in the thatching as well, dead or dying. Their bloating bodies are mixed in with the reeds. Smothered by mud and ambition, they had faltered on uneven ground, and drowned while hoping for a hand to lift them out.

Xu Shu watches them pass under the hooves of his horse, crushed deeper into the mud by the wheels of the supply wagons.

On the rainiest of evenings, when all the other troops have been driven into their tents and only the most luckless sentries huddle down for the night, Xu Shu sets out his personal gameboard, weathered and nicked. Wine stains one corner - accidental, a drunken argument at the next table over - and time has rubbed the color of it into the wood like a rotting infection creeping steadily forward, like a corner of the swamp that he sent thirty men into only a few days ago, and never saw again.

He doesn't know all their names. He should. He wrote each of the letters to their families, claiming that the deaths had been noble, that they could not have been prevented, that they saved others from similar grief. He had lined up the rows of coin purses like headstones on his table, anonymous and accusing, and had scrawled out the same empty praise mechanically thirty times over while other Shu officers had swept in and out of the tent, checking on the progress of the memorial compensations. It's because of Xu Shu that those soldiers are dead. There was no other hand that had wielded the sword; his orders were their only enemy. All because he had misread the weather.

He cannot remember their names.

Zhuge Liang, he thinks, has books upon books of his dead. A strategist's hands are never clean. Zhuge Liang has libraries extolling his own slaughters, and if he began a recitation of his list with the dawn, he would still not be finished with the setting of the sun. Zhuge Liang's death list is a chorus: both are orchestrated.

Safe inside from the rain, Xu Shu puts aside the maps and plays _xiangqi_ alone. The battered, strained gameboard is a fitting reflection of the territory of himself. Marred and imperfect, made ugly not by grand feats of daring, but through being a bystander only to other quarrels, battles that no one should extol. Soldiers have used it as a place to rest their helmets, their gloves still dripping with rain. It has fallen into the dirt more than once. It is not a respectable board. It does not serve as it should.

He plays the board and he plays himself, wondering how history would have turned out if the positions had been reversed, and _he_ had been assigned to defend Liu Bei from a fire attack - if _he_ had been watching for subterfuge, for the winds to change. He takes apart the piece order and reassembles them as if they were human troops, working through the fire formation, the _xuanxiang_, the spike, the goose. Each time, he reacts more quickly from the defensive line. He conserves, refuses to sacrifice. He fails at positioning his own marker efficiently on the board. Shu's soldiers die by the dozens under his clumsy command. He cannot play with them, and he cannot play against them, and the pieces keep slipping out of his hands.

Xu Shu opens with Red, always, but Black is the side through which he wins.

* * *

The generals of his divisions say that they understand. Territory, supplies, logistics; they are all part of a strategist's role to evaluate, but he is not responsible for pulling fair weather down from the skies themselves. Only Zhuge Liang is capable of such miracles. Even Pang Tong - their Phoenix - is merely human. _If that was the only route you saw_, they shrug, _then it was the only route._

They expect nothing more from Xu Shu, after all.

He _wants_ it to be more. He fears if it is. Xu Shu has directed these troops through battle already at Changban, and he knows they will listen to his voice. Their faith has placed their own lives in his care. In reward, he brings them imperfect victories, riddled with gaps wide enough that it was luck alone that did not expose them. Too many of Cao Cao's officers escaped instead of being killed. Too many killed, instead of captured. Too many ways where Xu Shu could have been just a little bit _better_, if only he knew how.

If he is to be a proper strategist, he must be able to send soldiers to their deaths with a clean conscience and a clear gaze, as cold and perfect as Zhuge Liang.

Such a pinnacle feels like winning a game of _xiangqi_ in only two moves: impossible to reach. If Xu Shu could only force himself to think in terms of simple numbers instead of people - of Lui Bei ascendant over all - then perhaps he could make that climb. Perhaps then, he will be freed from remembering even his own existence, save as a line on a report, a stranger whose greatest distinction was that he did not fail significantly enough.

Benevolence, he thinks, grimacing as the horses wade through a particularly deep pass. Murky liquid slaps against his legs. The waters are up to the soldier's chests. One man stumbles in the mud and chokes on a mouthful of brackish liquid, hacking and spitting as he struggles not to fall.

Benevolence is a dream which only other dreams are allowed to touch.

They ride through swampland and corpses towards Nan Commandery, counting out their own deaths in miserly tallies. When word comes that Cao Cao has escaped after all, the sigh that ripples around the officer's tent is a single disappointment exhaled from a dozen throats.

He cannot allow himself to show his weakness. But in his mind, Xu Shu closes his eyes and lets the familiar whispers mount.

(If only he had thought of this. If only he had done that.)

(If only he had struck first.)

That night, he brings out his gameboard again. This time, he lays out both sides in a spray of fallen pieces, Red chasing Black. He plays with the rules he was taught, and then with no rules at all, mixing soldiers alongside ministers. He throws aside his own fears, ruthlessly ignoring every thought which does not begin and end with troop motions. He plays himself, over and over, until both sides blur together, trying to find a way to outmaneuver fate.

* * *

After Cao Ren is driven away from Fan Castle, Xu Shu holds his hand out in the dwindling rain. His palm is turned up towards the sky. Each drop of water shatters itself on the leather of his glove. The punishing barrage is little more than a drizzle now. Shu's forces have already fallen to celebration, in defiance of the fact that their fortress nearly became their own death trap.

He is already outlining the battle in his mind, regathering the flurry of positions so that he can write it all down dutifully later, and apologize for the dead. Even in victory, it still feels as if there are too many of the latter. The resignation of it settles over his shoulders, chaining his bones with iron pins. A better strategist would not have allowed the enemy to advance so far.

It is a sour thought.

But Xu Shu's own training halts him unexpectedly, suddenly jerking him back from his own condemnations. It would not let him miss the most obvious opportunities during the battle; it will not spare him now.

No. No - Xu Shu had attacked well _before_ the enemy had properly revealed themselves. The rain had been his rallying flag. He hadn't waited to send troops against it, pinpointing Fan Castle's weakness and claiming it before anyone else could dare. The ballistae had been an instinctive follow-up: a wave of preemptive retaliation, pointed in the direction where _he_ would have attacked from next. There had been no time to question. Only to continue his own charge forward, seizing each scrap of territory and refusing to give it back as Shu soldiers had followed his words across the field to victory.

Boldness, not brashness.

He had moved first.

In the distance, Ma Chao's boisterous voice ricochets across the battlements. Pang Tong's hat bobs through the troops. Guan Yu and Huang Zhong are already discussing the battle quietly together, heads inclined as they murmur and scratch their beards in thought. Beyond them, Guan Yinping idly balances her mace like a willow branch on her shoulder, oblivious to its weight while her brothers stretch their arms and brag about their victories.

They are his army. They are alive.

He closes his fingers. Above him, the skies are already starting to clear. Sunlight gilds the water. Soldiers trickle out in smaller scouting groups, hunting for enemy stragglers. There are reports waiting to be written. There are battles waiting to be won.

Xu Shu stands in the shadow of Fan Castle, towered over by vast walls which stretch higher than he ever imagined he could reach - but the earth under his feet is his own.


End file.
